3.8.1 The year Buckminster Fuller passes away marks also a flurry of telecommunication experiments as desktop computers became accessible. In 1983, Ascott organises "La Plissure du Texte" as part of "Electra 1983," a collaborative story-telling project using a process of distributed authorship-a planetary fairy tale. IPSATEXT was the first major art event that clearly demonstrated the potential for collective authorship on a global scale. This event was staged at the same time that MUDs and MOOs became the pastime of young computer programmers working long hours. Although the project was remarkably similar to a MUD, Roy Ascott had no knowledge of the worlds of MUDs and MOOs. In parallel to his experimentation with distributed authorship in the context of the art world, a system for this kind of work was being established, and it was not coming from the literary circles.

3.8.2 An entire telematic subculture was being constructed by young programmers and the original hackers, who were finding ways to play during their long hours in front of the computer. The art world remained oblivious to much of this creative telematic output that was taking place since 1972 when William Crowther, using Fortran programming language, plotted out a cave puzzle game. It was expanded by Don Woods in 1976, a researcher at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, who added fictional elements drawn from Tolkien.(Murray, 1995, pg. 290) But, it was really Zork that brought in the Dungeons and Dragons element, which MUDs (Multi User Dungeons) inherited. The game introduced the typing of navigational commands and searching for objects residing in different "rooms." MUDs began as a collective games of Zork, although the "players" were most excited at the possibility of sharing the virtual space and role playing. [8]

3.8.3 Curtis Pavel, a programmer from Xerox Parc working on research with programming language and design, programming environments, programming language compilers, and interpreters, already had experience with Zork when he stumbled on to MUDs. He remembers logging on to the old ARPANET every evening and exploring the mapping of the Great Underground empire. But what was really exciting to him about the MUD he discovered is that many people were logged on at the same time and were able to talk to one another. (Pavel, 1998, pg. 27)

3.8.4 James Aspnes, a graduate student from Carnegie Mellon, invented TINYMUD, software that allowed users to talk to one another and gain access to the programming language itself. The first developer of a MOO server was Stephen White. Pavel Curtis of Xerox Parc built upon White's basic design and code and supplemented it with added features, which culminated in the first LambdaMOO core. (Pavel, 1998, pg. 29) MOOs offer an alternative to MUDs, which are fixed environments controlled by an oligarchy of programmers. The MOO environment is easier to program, with a format closer to natural language, and it allows users to create objects in categories and subcategories.

3.8.5 For participants, MOOs can be described as constellations of spaces, or "rooms," within which multiple individuals can congregate and interact. Movement is possible from room to room by typing in cardinal directions or via "teleporting," which allows immediate transport to rooms not adjacent to the ones present. In a MOO one uses commands to do many things: move between distinct places; manipulate objects; interact with people who in reality may live thousands of miles away; create new imaginary places; describe one's character, the places one creates, and the objects one owns; e-mail; and conduct live events. Pavel refers to MUDs and MOOs as "text-based virtual realities," which could be considered an oxymoron, or it could be taking us back to the idea of literature transporting us to the imaginary. In our imaginations, we are free to interpret and visualise as we please instead of having the worlds defined for us. But, perhaps what remains most powerful about text-based multi-user systems is that the information is so compact that it allows easy movement away from the terminals. With the proliferation of palm-sized portable computing, connected wireless to the Net, it is already a powerful tool. (I will elaborate more on how this is used in the Information Personae architecture, in chapter 8).

3.8.6 To date, text based environments are still active with hundreds of thousands of users, and provide useful research data for those planning commercial ventures with graphical multi-user communities on the Web. Naturally, the graphical offspring promise numbers projected into the hundreds of millions (Advertising Age, 1996). There are over 500 MOOs (Turkle, 1995) in existence, with hundreds of thousands of users who might easily make a transition from the text based environments to more graphically designed spaces. [top]

Notes:

8. For a psychosocial analysis of role-playing in the MUDs, see Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen. A more popular rendition is Howard Rheingold's Virtual Community. [back]